{"id":2311,"date":"2021-09-20T01:14:22","date_gmt":"2021-09-20T01:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=2311"},"modified":"2021-09-20T01:17:08","modified_gmt":"2021-09-20T01:17:08","slug":"ftv-never-a-dull-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/?p=2311","title":{"rendered":"FTV: Never A Dull Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0What more can be said about the year 1971 that I have not already covered?\u00a0 As a 1971 Marquette Senior High School graduate, I remain fond of that particular year.\u00a0 It would take a full page of entries to catalogue the number of FTV\u2019s that have mentioned happenings from one of my favorite years.\u00a0 Enter David Hepworth, author of <\/span>Never A Dull Moment:\u00a0 1971 – The Year That Rock Exploded.\u00a0 <\/span><\/i>I am familiar with many of the events Hepworth wrote about, but was astounded at the level of detail he provided about the musical events of 1971.\u00a0 David Hepworth has done a true \u2018Paul Harvey\u2019 with <\/span>Never A Dull Moment<\/span><\/i>:\u00a0 now I know \u201cthe rest of the story.\u201d\u00a0 Let us examine a few of the remarkable, if lesser known, musical happenings from that pivotal year.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The business side of rock music began a major transformation in 1970-71 led by an unlikely champion of rock economics:\u00a0 Mick Jagger.\u00a0 Hepworth describes the Rolling Stones in 1970:\u00a0 \u201cThe old saying goes that most people in the music business are either poorer than you\u2019d think or richer than you could possibly imagine.\u00a0 At the time, the Stones were in the former category.\u201d\u00a0 Yes, they were famous, but in a perfect storm of \u2018that is the music business circa the 1960s\u2019 set of circumstances, the Stones were stuck between a rock and a hard place.\u00a0 Their American manager, Alan Klein, channeled a good share of the band\u2019s late 1960s revenues through his own ABKCO organization.\u00a0 The band was preoccupied with the physical and mental decline of Brian Jones (and his eventual ouster from the band (see FTV:\u00a0 Brian Jones 2-3-21)), so they weren\u2019t exactly keeping an eye on the business end.\u00a0 Add Britain\u2019s stifling income tax and surtax (which could range between 83 and 98 percent) and the Stones found their profit margin was nonexistant.\u00a0 When the back taxes were tallied up, even Bill Wyman (who did not participate in the lucrative song- writing\/publishing end of the band) was in the hole to the tune of $200,000.\u00a0 Even by today\u2019s standards, this was not chump change, especially in 1970.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Mick had taken enough economics courses at university to realize the antiquated sixties management template was the root cause of their pauperism.\u00a0 Bands with no business sense relied on a manager to negotiate contracts and act as an expensive nanny service.\u00a0 Jagger assessed the situation, paid attention to what transpired at the business meetings he attended, and hatched a new business action plan.\u00a0 Alan Klein was out.\u00a0 Jagger then turned to Prince Rupert Loewenstein for advice.\u00a0 As the managing director of a merchant bank (Leopold Joseph), Loewenstein was an expert in the area of wealth management so the band hired him to be their business advisor.\u00a0 The Stones also elected to put themselves in charge of future management decisions for the Mark II version of the band.\u00a0 Loewenstein\u2019s first advice was to have the band move out of England to a country with a lower tax burden, in this case France.\u00a0 Other bands would follow a similar pattern in the future, but the term \u2018tax exile\u2019 we hear today was first used to describe Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones who more or less invented the concept in alliance with Loewenstein.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun had sold his label to Warner Brothers in 1967, but he kept his position of influence in the new ownership.\u00a0 Although he had done well putting out hit singles by Ray Charles, Big Joe Turner, the Coasters, and other top African American artists, he realized that the market was changing.\u00a0 Albums were beginning to dominate the industry and by 1971 he lured the Stones to Atlantic aiming to sell more records to the white market.\u00a0 It was a lucrative deal for the Stones when coupled with their determination to take control of their own product.\u00a0 Their first release by Atlantic, <\/span>Brown Sugar<\/span><\/i>, came out on the Stone\u2019s own label.\u00a0 The song was owned by the band.\u00a0 After finding out that Alan Klein owned the American rights to their earlier hits, they vowed to never let that happen again.\u00a0 Their royalties were directed to an account in the Netherlands where royalties were not taxed.\u00a0 The Stones took their first steps to pay off their massive tax debts and literally transformed how bands would do business in the future.\u00a0 Not bad for a bunch of bad boy rockers who entered the 1970s looking like they were about to fold the tents.\u00a0 There would be more drama involving the Stones in the future, but 1971 found them living in various parts of France and recording some of their best work at Keith Richards Nellcote digs using their mobile recording truck (yes, the same one immortalized in Deep Purple\u2019s <\/span>Smoke On The Water<\/span><\/i>).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Another seachange in the music world began in 1971 when American radio listeners began to migrate away from Top Forty AM.\u00a0 FM radio had a cleaner sound and the earliest stations broke away from playing singles in order to program more eclectic tracks, even whole albums.\u00a0 This \u2018free form\u2019 radio format would have languished sooner than later because, as Hepworth quoted a radio programmer from the day, \u201cIt was either too hip or too hype.\u201d\u00a0 The emergence of FM as a media force can be traced back to a radio nerd\/band manager from Chicago named Lee Abrams.\u00a0 Trying to find a way to make his cover band more appealing, he began polling the audience as to what they wanted to hear.\u00a0 He studied radio, corresponded with DJs, read the trade papers, and attended industry conventions, all in a quest to improve what he heard on the air.\u00a0 He offered to share his revelations with interested radio stations:\u00a0 The \u2018sweet spot\u2019 in programming was not created by spinning a record that was already a hit.\u00a0 Abrams told stations the way to make listeners love the station and its sponsors was to spin the songs just as the public was discovering them.\u00a0 He helped stations fuel the listener\u2019s infatuation with a record by using his data to anticipate the next hit, thus making radio more of a taste-maker than just a jukebox spinning hits.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0By the time Lee Abrams got his first actual radio job, he was all in with FM.\u00a0 When he put his ideas into practice, first at WRIF in Detroit and later at WPTF in North Carolina, his motto became \u201cfamiliar music works.\u201d\u00a0 Success came when one polled the audience all the time and programmed the most popular cuts by the artists the listeners said they wanted to hear.\u00a0 The DJs were given a playlist and a script to follow and it worked just fine for the artists who made the playlists.\u00a0 Certainly, those who did not make the list were angry.\u00a0 The format produced mega record sales for the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Linda Ronstatdt, and a host of other popular acts regarded as Classic Rock fodder today.\u00a0 The \u2018Stereo 100\u2019 effect was created because of a corporate trick used to dominate the market.\u00a0 A corporation would buy a lot of stations in the low 100 FM frequencies and program them all with the same playlist.\u00a0 It got to be so formulamatic, one could set their watch by which song came on during each half hour block.\u00a0 I have previously written about hearing <\/span>Lady<\/span><\/i> by Styx every day within a four block stretch driving to my student teaching assignment in the spring of 1975.\u00a0 We ended my survey class teaching seventh graders chess when we heard <\/span>You Having My Baby<\/span><\/i> come over the intercom system we tapped for background music.\u00a0 By the time I had <\/span>Lady<\/span><\/i> burned into my brain, there were more than 300 stations across the United States using Abram\u2019s principles.\u00a0 As a result, FM flourished and AOR (album-oriented rock or adult-oriented rock) was pulled from the underground niche market and became part of the new mainstream for radio listeners.\u00a0 The \u2018Stereo 100\u2019 effect waned, but the principles are still alive and well in the satellite radio market.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Singer\/Songwriter Carole King was another beneficiary of the FM radio boom.\u00a0 Though her <\/span>Tapestry<\/span><\/i> album was recorded in 1971, it has hung around long enough to sell twenty-five MILLION copies.\u00a0 Carole Klein (no relation to Alan) married her high school sweetheart and together, they penned hit records for Aldon Music.\u00a0 The Goffin-King duo made a decent living and their credits appeared on hits like <\/span>The Loco-motion, Up On The Roof, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, (You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman, <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>Pleasant Valley Sunday.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0 After Goffin\u2019s mental health took a turn for the worse after taking LSD, King took her triple threat skills (she could write, arrange, and sing) and her two daughters from New York to Los Angeles.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Lou Adler had worked for Aldon and he also ended up in California.\u00a0 He knew talent having previously worked with Sam Cooke and helping guide the Mamas and Papas.\u00a0 Adler is also remembered as one of the prime movers and shakers for his work organizing the Monterey Pop Festival.\u00a0 While they were both at Aldon, Adler noticed the record company people he sent King\u2019s demos to took them home for their own enjoyment.\u00a0 In California, he decided Carole King needed to make a record with the same homespun feel of the original demos she made back in New York.\u00a0 Adler wanted King\u2019s record to have the same appeal as James Taylor\u2019s 1970 release <\/span>Sweet Baby James, <\/span><\/i>a record that sold a lot of copies.\u00a0 Adler picked the right man, recording engineer Hank Cicalo, to oversee the sessions.\u00a0 Cicalo knew just how to set up the right studio atmosphere to record the lowkey, homespun sounding album Adler described.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Ace musicians Russ Kunkel (drums), Danny Kotchmar (guitar), and Charles Larkey (bassist and King\u2019s squeeze at the time), were set up in Capitol Records smaller Studio B.\u00a0 The group was arranged so King could make eye contact with them and \u2018direct them\u2019 with nods and looks as they recorded.\u00a0 They did sneak into the larger Studio A so they could use the best piano in the building for three of the tracks (<\/span>I Feel The Earth Move, Natural Woman, <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>\u00a0You\u2019ve Got A Friend<\/span><\/i>) which they banged out in three hours.\u00a0 The entire five day recording process was followed up with some overdubbing.\u00a0 On January 27, A&M Records house photographer Jim McCrary was dispatched to 8815 Appian Way in Laurel Canyon above Sunset Boulevard to photograph King for the album cover.\u00a0 AT 28 years old, King was already a thirteen year veteran of the music business, but she worked behind the scenes.\u00a0 Being photographed wasn\u2019t something King was accustomed to.\u00a0 Hepworth described the shoot:\u00a0 \u201cShe had prepared herself for McCrary\u2019s lens by putting on a sensible pullover and jeans, much as she would have done had she been weeding the garden.\u00a0 She had little interest in or flair for glamour,\u00a0 She was fond of remarking, even then, that she was at heart a middle-aged Jewish lady from Brooklyn.\u00a0 When McCarary arrived, she was working on a tapestry.\u00a0 The presence of her cat (Telemachus) helped the picture strike a note of calm, warmth, and domesticity;\u00a0 a note that chimed perfectly with the music inside that cover.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Tapestry<\/span><\/i> was released two weeks after the photo shoot and by mid-summer it was at the top of the charts.\u00a0 It remained on the <\/span>Billboard Chart<\/span><\/i> in the number one slot for fifteen consecutive weeks and on the album charts for nearly six years.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t a matter of \u2018no competition\u2019 as there were a slew of <\/span>Billboard All Time Albums<\/span><\/i> released at the same time including <\/span>The Yes Album, Pearl<\/span><\/i> by Janis Joplin, Harry Nilsson\u2019s <\/span>The Point!<\/span><\/i>, Elton John\u2019s <\/span>Tumbleweed Connection, <\/span><\/i>and the Faces\u2019 <\/span>Long Player<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 While record buyers were toting 150,000 copies of <\/span>Tapestry<\/span><\/i> home every week in 1971, FM radio kept adding more and more tracks from the album onto the playlist.\u00a0 Carole King was playing piano in James Taylor\u2019s band at the time and had never headlined a show.\u00a0 The artists who suddenly found their records below hers on the Top Ten included The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, the Carpenters, C,S,N&Y, Jethro Tull, Aretha Franklin, and The Partridge Family. They must have wondered what had happened in their industry.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The idea of the massive outdoor music festival had already been on the downward spiral since the tragedy known as Altamont.\u00a0 Altamont put the lid on the coffin of large American festivals, so to speak, but the nails were provided by the Newport Jazz Festival and The Celebration of Life held in Louisiana.\u00a0 Newport thought inviting the Allman Brothers would attract more young people and they certainly got their wish.\u00a0 Unfortunately, most were content to camp outside the festival grounds where they could hear the bands just fine.\u00a0 That is until they tore down the fence (ironically while Dione Warwick was on stage singing \u2018<\/span>What the world needs now, is love, sweet love\u2019<\/span><\/i>), stormed the stage, destroyed equipment, and caused organizers to cancel the last two days of the event.\u00a0 Newport\u2019s Jazz festival would move to New York for a decade as a result.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Booking an outdoor festival in a swampy area along the Atchafalaya River in Louisiana in June was an act of pure insanity.\u00a0 Big name bands were promised (but many were never booked to begin with) and the organizers repeated every festival no-no right down to hiring a New Orleans motorcycle gang called the Galloping Gooses to act as security.\u00a0 It turned out to be less of a festival than a stay at a tropical forced labor camp, only with worse sanitary conditions.\u00a0 Large outdoor festivals would reappear in the future and apparently the organizers of big events like Lollapalooza and Milwaukee\u2019s SummerFest have studied their history books and corrected many of the problems.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Oddly enough, the spearpoint for today\u2019s large festivals in Great Britain began with the first Glastonbury Fayre held to coincide with the Summer Solstice, June 21, 1971.\u00a0 Stonehenge was ruled out as a site (it is located in the midst of valuable agricultural land) so it was eventually organized in Pilton.\u00a0 Pilton is actually seven miles from Glastonbury, but the organizers thought it was close enough to cash in on that settlement\u2019s\u00a0 more romantic name.\u00a0 Things were done on the cheap:\u00a0 the stage only cost 1,100 pounds and they had to limit the number of bodies on stage to the \u2018performing band only\u2019 to keep it from collapsing.\u00a0 The lavatories were literally holes in the ground spanned by scaffolding poles.\u00a0 Bands were expected to perform for free because the organizers wanted everything to be free (unlike Woodstock that became a free festival but not willingly).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0While the initial Glastonbury Fayre does not sound like the ideal way to organize a festival, it has survived and thrived into the new millenium.\u00a0 It has also spawned a number of large festivals that are beginning to gear up again after most were cancelled in 2020 by you-know-what.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Space does not allow for more 1971 anecdotes at this time, so I will leave you with Hepworth\u2019s own summation of the events of that pivotal year:\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s not surprising the music of 1971 is in everyone\u2019s bloodstream,\u00a0 It no longer belongs to the people who made it or just to those of us who were lucky enough to be there when they did so.\u00a0 Now it belongs to everybody.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Top Piece Video – Vintage 1971 Carole King from the BBC –\u00a0Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0What more can be said about the year 1971 that I have not already covered?\u00a0 As a 1971 Marquette Senior High School graduate, I remain fond of that particular year.\u00a0 It would take a full page of entries to catalogue the number of FTV\u2019s that have mentioned happenings from one of my favorite years.\u00a0 Enter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,11,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bands-musicians","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2311"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2314,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311\/revisions\/2314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}